Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

May 22, 2015

Searching for social media content isn’t something that is the easiest thing in the world to do. You have to decide what social media networks you want to look for, then find a search engine that is going to provide you with access to it. Then you have to decide on your next network and start the whole process again. That also presupposes that you know exactly which networks are available, and that’s not always straightforward. There are an increasing number of social media search engines available to searchers, but I have done a review of Social Searcher on my website at http://www.philb.com/socialsearcher.html

May 19, 2015

One of the questions that I'm often asked is 'should I use Google.co.uk or Google.com?' It's an interesting question, without an obvious answer. If you search the local version of Google the idea is that you'll get local results, so a search for 'football' will give you soccer results, not American football information. However, Google is intelligent enough to know what the computer IP address is, and will give you local content anyway - it doesn't matter if I'm logged into my Google account, or I am logged out, I'll still get English football related content. If I do anything that Google considers to be a local search, such as 'library' I'm going to get links to local libraries and a handy little map to go along with it. (Though to be fair, if I'm not logged into my account, this option isn't available.)

However, if I'm using the .co.uk version of the search engine, I'll come under the 'right to be forgotten' ruling, which means that some content may have been removed (if you're not familiar with this, I wrote a blog post on it some time ago) which doesn't really cause me an issue, but it's a vague irritant - it may not bother you of course.

Google however, thinks it's a big deal, and they're starting to make it harder to get to the .com version. If you're using the .co.uk (or any other local version) you always used to get a link at the bottom right of the screen offering you the opportunity to go to .com, but this now only appears the first time that you go to the site - after that, the link disappears. You have to type in the .com address into the browser address bar to get there. Now, you may feel that this isn't a big deal, but given the way that Google is trying to push its users down particular paths (we're seeing it all of the time with search for example), it's a interesting albeit somewhat worrying look into a potential future in which we are automatically piped to one version or the other. You can get around this however - either with the simple expedient of remembering to go to .com or by adding http://www.google.com/ncr into the address bar. This stands for 'no country redirection' and should mean that it's not necessary to keep having to find .com in the future.

In summary, it's not a major issue, but if you are working with people who are searching using Google, it's worth mentioning the different country versions, and if they particularly prefer to use the .com version and can't seem to find it, now you know!

May 15, 2015

We’ve seen in recent months – in fact in recent years – that Google really isn’t interested in the search process. Rather than developing and improving their offering they have in fact been reducing it. We lost the tilde symbol (~) to search for synonyms and more recently the opportunity to filter by pages that you have or have not visited has gone, as has the reading level option. That’s just a small sample, there are many more. It’s clear that Google doesn’t want us to search, it wants to know best, and give us exactly what IT thinks we need, irrespective of our own search criteria. The result is that Google has brought itself back in line with other search engines, and there are fewer reasons to consider using it above and beyond the other engines out there. It’s true that it does have a large database of pages, but since most searchers are not going to look further than the first 20 or so results, I have to wonder just how important that is.

So I decided to take a more indepth look at Yandex; it's very impressive, with advanced search features that outstrip anything that Google can offer. If you're a serious searcher, it's worth considering. You can read my review (warts and all) on my website: Yandex, an alternative to Google.

May 12, 2015

Google has further reduced the search functionality of the engine. There are two new victims, both of which increasingly limit what searchers can do. It's no longer possible to limit search results to pages that you have already visited, or ones that you haven't. This was a really useful tool, especially when you were working on variations of a search, or you were coming back to a search that you may have started the previous day. It was possible to simply show results from pages that you'd looked at - really helpful when you knew that you'd seen something that was really helpful, but couldn't exactly recall where it was. By using that filter, you had at least a fighting chance to narrow down the options. Alternatively, if you were still hunting for the information that you wanted, it was really helpful to be able to discount all of the pages that you *had* looked at, and just focus on the ones that had not yet been viewed. All in all, a great way to save yourself some time and effort.

A second search function, which wasn't so widely used, but which was still very helpful was that of the reading level. Google had created a method of working out if the language on a page was basic, intermediate or advanced. This was again a really good way of filtering results - if you needed material for a school child for example, filter to basic reading level, or if the users first language wasn't English, it was a way of finding pages that they'd have a fair chance of working through. On the other hand, if you were doing research for a post graduate, knocking out all the basic material would give the user a chance to find material at the academic level that was of interest to them. Not a foolproof method at all, but it was a good way to get a fighting chance at good quality data.

Now both of these have gone. Google has decided that we don't need them, or more likely, that it's not prepared to put any effort in to keep them going. It's moving even further down the route of 'we know what is best for you, so suck it up'. Of course, what it really means is that all of the functionality that used to put Google into a different league is being pared away, and I'm finding it more and more difficult to think of reasons to use it above and beyond any of the other engines out there.

I hope that I'm wrong, but I suspect the next piece of functionality to go will be 'Verbatim'. This is the filter that you can use to tell Google to search for *exactly* what you have written, rather than what it thinks that you want. This costs Google time, effort and money to keep running, and since their interest in search is being reduced at a frightening pace, this is what's going to go next - it's a logical next step on the road towards 'we know what's best for you.' It's going to make the search engine virtually unusable for anything other than simple straightforward queries, and certainly of no value for any serious research. I would seriously suggest to any advanced searchers out there that they start to find themselves another preferred search engine as quickly as possible, because Google just won't be able to cut it for much longer.

May 07, 2015

There hasn't really been much by the way of a search engine for national and regional newspapers for some time, so I thought it would be a good idea to create one. Well actually, several. I have used the Google custom search engine option to create both national and 46 regional/local newspaper (the latter is England only at the moment) search engines.

The National UK newspapers engine is available both hosted by Google and on my own website. This covers papers such as the FT, Times, Mirror and so on. The national and local collection of 384 newspapers is again hosted by Google and on my own website.

I have created individual search engines for cities, regions and counties:

I haven't yet done regional newspapers for Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales; due to time as much as anything else; this was quite a task to find them and create engines, so I want a bit of a break! However, if there is interest in those I'm more than happy to create them. I'm not entirely sure how robust the Google code is, so if you have any difficulties, refresh the page and try again, and let me know.

May 01, 2015

People based search engines are not new - we've had Mahalo and ChaCha in the past, but neither of them have really cut it, and so both have now evolved into slightly different resources. Now we have a new entrant into the field in the form of 'Wonder - your personal research assistant.' The idea is very straightforward; simply type in your question in 'human form', rather than keywords, since a real life human being is going to try and answer the question that you've asked. Wonder then takes your query - passes it onto a researcher who emails the answer back to you inside 2 hours.

I tried one of my usual questions - 'How was it decided that the D-Day beaches were given the code names that they were, and where did they get the names?' It's an interesting query, since it's not as easy as it first appears - the names of the beaches are obvious of course, but the who and the what behind it, a bit more complicated.

At 1 hour 40 minutes I got an email response from a 'Wonder librarian' called Emily. She found some great resources for me which answered my question (as best as it can be answered) and I was able to see the list of sites that she suggested as well. All in all, I was very impressed.

That's obviously only one side of the story though - I have 'reached out to them' and asked for more details - who do they use as researchers, do they get paid, how does the monetization of the system work, since I couldn't see any adverts, who checks their work and so on. 2 days later I'm still waiting for a response, so maybe I should ask one of the own research people. I'm also keen to know how they regard this against the many 'Ask a librarian' services as well. If I get an answer - I'll let you all know.

However, until then - and only going with one answer - it's doing exactly what it says on the tin.

Edited to add: I have now had a response to my email with more information from Justin Wohlstadter as follows:

How do you make money, since there's no advertising on the site. Or isthat something you'll add in the future, and if so, what plans do youhave?

We don't have any plans to advertise on the site. We're experimenting with a few different pricing models at the moment, with the goal of putting one in place that can support free questions for students while charging those who use Wonder for work or need more timely responses.

What is the criteria that you use to add someone to your query answering team?

We look for individuals with exceptional backgrounds, deep subject experience, and degrees in library sciences or in various technical and professional fields. And we have a preference for good writers who express their thoughts clearly! Wonder has coverage 24/7, so our research community includes people around the globe.

How do you check their work?

We have a robust Q&A process in place to ensure that every research response is great. Several of our researchers are tasked with reviewing every response to verify that they meet our research guidelines. And feedback emails also help us make sure that our researchers were on target.

Do they get paid? If so, how much?

Our research community is comprised of librarians, teachers, and professionals, many of whom are volunteering their time to help students and other learners. To ensure we have full coverage, some of these individuals are compensated (though the exact number is variable). We invite anyone who might be interested to apply to join the community. And for volunteers there's no minimum time commitment and it's actually quite fun.

How many questions have you answered so far?

Many!

How would you see Wonder differing from an 'ask a librarian' service.Ask a Librarian services are wonderful, but unfortunately not many people know about them. I think we have an opportunity to bring that kind of experience to many more people by making it a lot more accessible and easy to use.

Mahalo started off in similar fashion, as did Cha-Cha. How do you differentiate between them and yourselves, and did you learn any lessons from them?

Often it's hard to know from the outside whether companies succeed or fail because of product issues, market timing issues, or completely unrelated forces. We just want to build something that people enjoy and that moves learning on the web forward.